In Manjaro cinnamon (5.8.4) there is no keyboard layout switch in the panel/toolbar tray.
How do I add that?
I’ve noticed this as well. The Keyboard applet is selected but it doesn’t appear in the tray for some reason. Uninstalling and then reinstalling it doesn’t fix it.
Hi, using Cinnamon 5.8.4 too here, I’ve the standard Keyboard layout switch (keyboard@cinnamon.org) working simply by adding the applet to the tray.
But if you want the flag from the selected layout to appear in the tray, you need to install the package iso-flag-png too!
And this package is not in the offcial repositories, but only available from AUR 
Whenever I try to add the keyboard applet, the tray visually redraws but no keyboard icon appears 
You need to make sure ibus is installed.
The only thing installed on my system that is IBus related is libibus (1.5.28-4), so you could check first if this library is missing…
Thanks for the suggestions. I installed ibus but it didn’t make any difference. Is there anything else I need to do? libibus was already installed.
Did you restart the system?
If it still doesn’t work after a system restart, you could make a right-click on the tray > Troubleshoot > Looking Glass > Log and see if there are somme error messages.
By me it says:
info t=2023-09-20T09:28:45Z Loaded applet keyboard@cinnamon.org in 13 ms
If nothing else helps, you can always try to reset Cinnamon to the default setting using a right-click on the tray > Troubleshoot > Restore all settings to default or gsettings reset-recursively org.cinnamon in a terminal.
Of course, be ready to reconfigure everything to your liking after that, because you will loose all the non standard applets, panels and themes you added, but that’s perhaps the root of your problem…
OK, in order for the keyboard switcher to show in the tray, you must;
- install
ibus - reboot the system
- open ibus from your Cinnamon menu, it will state the daemon is not running, would you like to start it, click “yes”.
Applet is running.
As I said before, in my case, IBus is not installed, so no ibus daemon running and yet, the keyboard switcher is working perfectly in the tray, I can switch between French and US English with a click, so I don’t think that’s the problem (and the solution) here, just saying…
I see where the issue is, iBus is not an applet. It is an input switcher for Linux in general. You have an applet from Cinnamon.org, two different things.
Ibus is the current “way” to go.
I know what IBus is. Both MENAM and manjbob seems to have problem to get the keyboard applet to appear in the tray/to get it working at all.
Again, this keyboard applet is working by me WITHOUT having IBus installed on my system…
MENAM and manjbob: sorry to ask, but did you first install at least one other keyboard layout? If you only have the default one of your language, that’s perhaps the reason…
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This doesn’t make sense… Can you post a screenshot of the About of the applet?
Here you go! As said before, here you can see a working keyboard applet WITHOUT having IBus installed on my system, outside of libibus 1.5.28-4…
I just added a 2nd keyboard layout (EN_US in my case), added the keyboard applet as usual in the tray, and the only thing that wasn’t showing up was the flags!
For that, I needed to also install the package iso-flag-png, which was sadly removed from the offcial repositories and moved to AUR…
OK, I’ve got iBus running now and that seems to work OK. I’m presuming this is different to Cinnamon’s own keyboard applet, which I still can’t get to appear?
UPDATE: Oh, I see now, fsw is correct - I didn’t have another Cinnamon keyboard layout already selected. Once I did that, it appeared as expected in the tray (and separate from the iBus).
Thanks to everyone and apologies for any confusion.
Great news! You’re welcome and don’t worry, what matters is that it is working now, and that you also know the reason why it wasn’t before 
Now it’s up to you to decide if you keep IBus installed or not, now that you have seen it has nothing to do with your problem…
Here is a simple, but interesting (and recent) discussion about this issue (on the Linux Mint forums, but it applies to all Linux distros in general): IBUS keyboard layouts vs System settings Layouts.
Spoiler alert/tl;dr: unless you want to add a Japanese, Korean or Chinese keyboard layout, you don’t need IBus at all…
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